Google's Negative Ranking Factors - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

By now you've heard about SEOmoz's study of Google ranking factors, but what about negative ranking factors? Sure, positive factors such as the correlations between social media shares and higher rankings earn a lot of attention - and they should. Smart SEOs look at all the factors, including those at the bottom of the list! Today we look at negative ranking factors - those SEO characteristics correlated with lower rankings - and how to avoid them.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to be talking about negative ranking factors.

Now, we talk about ranking factors a lot here at SEOmoz. Every two years SEOmoz publishes a study called the "Ranking Factors." We just published one about a month and a half ago, two months ago. The positive factors get a lot of publicity. We find things that correlate to higher rankings, and we spend a lot of our time on those.

Some of the more positive famous ranking factors that we talk about are such things as page authority, which has a 0.28 correlation to higher rankings. Now, I know we say this a lot, but I need to give my disclaimer here, that correlation does not equal causation. What this means is that when we see pages with high page authority, they are most likely associated with higher rankings. We look at thousands of search results across the website, we analyze those pages, and we try to find relationships characteristic of those pages and those higher rankings. When we find a relationship, we often say that they are positively correlated. Other elements that have positive correlation would be exact match dot com domains. So if your domain name is, say, Diamonds.com, you have a pretty good chance of ranking for diamonds - for that keyword. Also, linking root domains with partial anchor text is a 0.25 correlation. That just means the broad diversity of domains that link to you with some sort of partial anchor text, there is a pretty high correlation between that measurement and higher rankings. Now, this is what we talk about a lot.

What we don't talk a lot about is the opposite effect, the negative correlation. There are certain factors, there are certain things we find associated with web page that actually are associated with negative rankings. We don't pay a lot of attention to those, but they are actually in there in the ranking factors and they are all the way at the bottom, but they are sort of worth paying attention to, because if we can avoid these, we might be able to learn something about better ranking models and better correlations.

Domain Name Length

Starting with some simple ones, an obvious negative correlation is the domain name length, 0.07. This is kind of an obvious one. If you had a domain, Shoes.com, this tends to rank better in search results than something like Buy-Cheap-Mens-Shoes.com. Now again, correlation does not equal causation. We can think of a lot of reasons for this. For example, Shoes.com, that's probably a much older domain name. It's probably been around for 10 years, has a lot of back links going to it. Buy-Cheap-Mens-Shoes.com kind of looks a little spammy. It is probably not something that is going to earn a lot of links. By the way, if you go ahead and look at these correlation statistics, dashes actually are another negative factor. The more hyphens a domain name has, that is actually another negative correlation factor. That doesn't mean you can't use long domain names. It just means they tend to not do as well from what we observed.

Response Time

Kind of a controversial one here - response time. We love drawing small pictures of animals here on Whiteboard Friday, so here is our tortoise and our hare. 0.05. Now, we don't really know what this is. There is a lot of debate in the SEO world if slower web pages, slower servers cause lower rankings. We don't really have a lot of data on that. We don't really have a definite answer. What we can see from the correlation, this isn't a huge correlation, but we see that these pages tend to rank a little lower than others. We know that faster websites, faster response times present a better user experience. If you have a slow site, it is definitely worth looking into.

AdSense

Now here is a surprising one. There are a lot of people, getting new into SEO, they think that if you use Google services, such as installing Google Analytics on your site or putting AdSense on your site, that Google tends to favor those websites and that you'll rank higher. Correlation data shows exactly the opposite. Google AdSense slots correlated with lower rankings, 0.06. So website A here, if it has all these AdSense, and you've seen these pages - you click on them and they are filled with AdSense - they tend to not rank as well as pages with fewer AdSense slots. Another thing is the number of pixels. So, not only the amount of slots you have, but the pure amount of volume, of space on your website that is taken up by AdSense, we see those associated with lower rankings. Again, doesn't necessarily cause it, but that's what we see. As a user, if you think about it, which page would you rather link to? Both things being equal, I'd much rather link to that page. So it makes sense.

Percent of Followed Linking Pages

The most surprising result of this year's correlation data was the percent of followed linking pages. This requires a little bit of explanation. This means that if all your links pointing towards your domain are followed, we tend to see those sites ranking a little lower. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense off the get-go. You'd think if all your links were followed, you'd just be great in rankings. But think of domain diversity. Sites that rank well tend to have a lot of sites linking to them. They have sites like Wikipedia that have no followed links, citations no followed links. In general, they have a diverse link profile, whereas spammier sites, smaller sites, newer sites, they are going after those links. They have to work very hard for each one of them, and their diversity is not as great.

These are only a few of the negative ranking factors that you'll find in this year's 2011 SEOmoz Ranking Factors. You can dig into it. We'll link to it in the bottom of this post and Explore Your Own. It's worth looking into all of them. You can learn so much SEO. I love to hear your comments. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.

Good white board Friday some good points you raise, it is funny when you see people who say that Google Analytics and Google Adsense have a positive impact on ranks, it clearly does not do wonders over night especially if you bombard above the fold with adsense units. Another thing this has an impact on is if people run a network of websites and they run all Google services, Google can easily spot the sites joined up so it is not wise at all.

But yeah I never really see any very long domains ranking for decent search results, I think the best strategy is to buy a small domain that is good, then utalize keywords rich urls and target them heavily via that way.

You gotta be careful with how far you take your KW rich URLs and landing pages. Google's new thing is to judge the site by it's overall content quality, so if you build 10,000 shallow pages to target every possible phrase you'd find yourself in the risk group.

In fact all of the above negative factors (except ads) don't add up to what new quality algorithm changes can do to well ranking pages on the basis of other existing shallow content.

"One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content."

I have seen the beast in action and how serious it can be for very large website.

For sure if we are building KW rich pages on a website you want to make the content great too. I understand 100% if you make 1000s of KW rich pages and then only have a limited amount of content it will have a negative impact on rankings. I mean I have seen these types of websites work say 5 years ago but in todays market it is a strategy that clearly is not working to the same degree.

Yet then you can take high authority websites with huge amounts of trust with their user base, they can still get away with it. For example if Mashable decides to post a video embeded of Youtube and then has 2 lines of content, they will still gets 1000s of links, shares ect. It is kind of unfair in a way isnt it.

Someone did ask that question recently - maybe in QA... How come failblog.org thrives on other people's video content and if ither site tries to do the same it just get seen as duplicate. The answer is social reactions and UGC.

Followed Linking Pages being a negative factor? I still dont understand... if a linking pages can be a negative factors, i would right now create 100k links pointing to my competitor to kill them.... as with some of those "domain with malware linking to your page" = yet another extremely negative factor, is something that can be abused , no??

I mean if external source can highly impact your SERP negatively, i can easily create a blogspot account, and share malware overthere and gives 100k links to my competitor to kill them? will google even allow this abuse-able negative factors?

Help me here, I am still very new... Controlling what is in my site to prevent negative factor, is something i can life with.... but how the heck can I control something if somebody just want to lower my SERP via those external negative factor? how can i prevent them?

You are referring to blackhat seo. IKT, don't do anything that can attack your competitor. Here in the United States I had someone attack my client's site. This happened in February. The FBI got involved.

In Indonesia, i dont think any goverment agency would get involved over this case... that is why i feel so insecure about this,... because any time , my competitor would be able to attack me and give me a lot of headache... trust me if this EXTERNAL factor would impact negatively upon the site SERP , than sadly it is abuseable :( ...

Remember that correlation isn't causation. We can't assume that a high ratio of followed links hurts you, only that sites that rank well tend to not have this profile. It's a slight and nuanced observation. Also remember that number of linking domains has a strong positive correlation that would more than conteract any potential negative effects.

Malware tends to point to spammy sites. Another correlation/causation issue. It's not that malware links hurt you, it's more likely that those sites are spammy already. We see the two go hand in hand. Hence, correlation.

in other word, none of those might effect my SERP Negatively (isnt causation), but from the statistic, you are seeing a lot of correlation going around (such as the spammy sites links to another spammy sites, correlated) ??

I am sorry but english is not my first language :( , is my take on your comment, true or false?

Aren't the correlation numbers you are showing very low? When looking at the positive correlation factors, the highest are above 0.2, whereas with these negative factors, the lowest don't exceed -0.1. Should we even pay attention to these?

Great post Cyrus, I think that if we worry about only getting do follow links and not having any nofollow that would seem unnatural to google and other search engines. Like your trying to game the system.

Very interesting WBF.I have a question about the first point: Domain Length Name.Did you measure a gradation between hyphens in domain name between countries - well rather continents?But I guess you only examined on US basis.We in Europe tend to use more hypens in domain names (e.g. hotel-name.at) then you are used to do it in the US. I was just wondering if Google is able to see here a difference in that spammy hyphens factor between regions / countries.

Great WBF. The distribution and percentage of Followed and No Follow is still extremely important and this is something that you should monitor carefully. It's just a shame that things like Google+ are taking over and people are thinking that Google+ and Google+1 are the only things that make you rank well... People are starting to forget the original concept of what SEO is all about and this is starting to worry me.

I totally agree that social this and that is blinding people from the roots of optimization. We can't forget the origins and at the same time need to adapt to new medias and techniques to ensure our sites are found.

Adsense was a new one for me, not about being a negative factor, but about people thinking it can help their rankings, it doesn't make any sense for someone to think that...

Anyway, I did see a number of high percentage dofollow links from many clients that were scratching their heads for not ranking and calling me up to ask why did I create these few nofollow links, there is no use in them :) Got to love clients sometimes...

Be active on news and blog sites in the comments. Dont spam it, but generally they are some great no-followed links and also one of the best way to get traffic to your site if you are one of the first comments with good thoughts.

Very nice presentation. I was especially taken by the last point on followed links. I think that might also be applicable to older sites too in some ways. One site I work on has tons of good old fashion all natural links, but the people linking have low authority and are simply poor sites. I have often thought that those links might be weighing us down a little. I imagine the only way to get these poorer sites to stop linking is to actually contact them, right? Or is there an automated solution?

On the speed issue I have been going around and around with my tech department on this. We have one site for sure that in fact has speed issue but is very well received by the search engines because of it history and links. We have made tons of adjustments on the speed of the site. From rewriting code, to RAM, you name it. I have to say I have noticed a difference. However that difference is slight and could just be a coincidence. We are about to make one more huge adjustment for this client. We are going to upgrade all the hardware 100 percent. New servers, RAM, processors, load balancer, web heads, etc. We are not making all these changes for SEO value, we are doing it to reduce bounce rate and better user experience, however I have been making many notes on the server speed issue in correlation to getting more love from the engines . I will let you know what we notice when the upgrade is complete.

There are some good points here. I would agree with most of them. But as you guys know, we need to be careful with coming to conslusions based off slight corrilation data. For example, saying that no-followed links are needed because they show a diversity of link popularity may not be true. Think of it this way, a large site has 10s of thousands of links. Because they are such a large well know site they gain all kinds of links, followed, no-followed, anchor text, no anchor text, etc. Inevitably, they are going to get this diversity. But they also gain followed backlinks on a larger scale then a smaller site.

Also, adsense placement is important for building page value and gaining backlinks. But it is also important to point out that lots of ads limit SEO text space and optimized image space, especially if some kind of javascript mechanisim is not being used.

Overall, nice post and I like the corrilation study. I also agree with the points here. But there are many things to consider which could cause these data trends which makes it tough to generalize.

I think we need to keep reminding ourselves that Google’s guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=28800), on how to create Google-friendly sites, haven’t changes that much over the years, so if you follow them and have a structured approach to your website and marketing strategy; beyond rankings, we should do fine...

Definitely follow thought leaders like Cyrus and the SEOmoz team, but keep in mind the natural way the web evolves and don’t worry about being the first to adopt the latest trend (Google Buzz anyone?), or restructure the whole of your website just because you read a blog post about it, especially if you don’t have the resource to manage it.

Great article and video. I have post this video in my blog, a Malay language site. happysus.com

I want to ask one question, if that so call follow link from other site that link to our site. The probleum is, that link not created by us. Sure this will effect our blog. hah??? I see probleum here...

I agree with Katie Saxon example no follow, Twitter links, as a ranking factor. For Malay website search by google, most of keyword Competition low, links from sosial site like Twitter and facebook will rank fast our site in google.

Link diversition is certanly better than using once source of links i.e. only follow links. I did a test in a new website submiting links to one hundred follow directories. The website was new and the benefit was almost zero for few months. Few months later and after getting another couple of hundreds of more natural backlinks, the website was really well ranked. There are no shortcuts.

Interesting stuff Cyrus - personally I don't find the nofollow correlation to be that surprising - I wrote a post a while ago (on SEOptimise) suggesting that link profiles with a high-ratio of followed links can appear unnatural.

So from Google's point of view it's a clear sign of a website that is doing link building - so if 99% of links are followed (especially if they're from blogs, forums, directories etc) then it's likely to stand out a bit more.

You pointed out extremely true negative ranking factors. I also performed research on it and found out that Google is now ranking websites totally on user perspective. What ever the performance of the website is, either it has more backlinks or quality content, if user like it and they "stay" on your site then it will be ranked well.

I love this video. It pays testament to the fact that, in delivering our viewers a better user experience, we can better optimize our pages for the search engines. There's hardly a need to sacrifice viewer friendliness for better rankings, especially when many of these correlations suggest that there's a positive correlation between the two. Whether it's a friendly, non spammy domain name, limited advertisement space, quick response time, or even natural link diversity, each seems to benefit both the viewer and the ranking potential of the site. As far as I'm concerned, any factor that boasts a positive correlation between ranking and viewer friendliness is one that should be duly noted and increasingly targeted.

Super interesting; It's nothing I wouldn't have expected though. I just hope that these factors aren't actually causing the decreased rankings and that it's just the way that some more-spammy websites may be ran.

I'm very happy I stumbled across this older post today. We're planning a little round table discussion with some of our SEO clients, and completely forgot that I should touch on both positive ranking, and what we're doing. Plus things that they should avoid. Thanks, Cyrus. Yet another useful video.

I agree with what you've said. The time it takes to laod up a page I think has a major factor. If the page doesn't respond quick enough, people, search engines, bots, and everything in between will not go there or wait around for it to load.

Regarding : Domain Name Length and hypens, negative effect of this can vary. Have a clients site whose URL is quite long with hyphens and could look a bit spammy! However, is a good business and after over 12 months link building, now ranks in Top 5 results for some excellent competitive keywords and gets regular daily enquiries.

My site by the same token is long, uses hyphens and could look quite spammy, only been link building for a couple of months, however still feel should be able to rank in Top 5 results in time.

Response time - would say only be a major issue when talking about a very large retail store for example.Adsense, many of these sites will be sites effected by Google Panda update, would expect if site has good original content and lots of adsense ads then should still rank well, issue would be dupe or low quality content as opposed to the ads themselves.

Followed and no followed makes perfect sense, people naturally linking will no very little, if any, about relevance of a link being followed or not, having a mixture of both makes links look more natural, if all followed, will look very manipulated, what we are paid to do! However, needs to look as natural as possible.

Sites with long domain names may contain a larger percentage of spammy sites hoping the exact match domain name will compensate for the lack of quality content. This could easily explain a negative coralation for domain name length.

I have a personal comment, simply from personal experiance, with the sites running adsense or any sort of adveritsing.

Having advertising on your site, so as long as it is done according to Google's guidlines, shouldn't hurt or help your rankings directlry, HOWEVER, it can impact your bounce rate. If users come to your website and click on a ad and leave your website, then that could impact your rankings negativly.

Best practices is to put the ads on the bottom of the page so all the main content on your site is viewed by users first, before they click on any ads hence leaving your website.

It may not mean that Adsense lowers ranks, its just that forthe most part people that use adsense might use spammy techniques or are on the web for to make money instead of providing what the user wants.

In these comments we have discussed a lot about Google Adsense but what about Google Analytics. I have read many blogs claiming that Google Analytics code in a website cause to slow speed of page loading. Is that really true? Plz reply I am curious to know.

Yes here i have a question, one of my competitor create a long spammy URL blog, and always post copied content to it, but the thing is their blog is always on top and you know what that keyword is most competitive on search enigne don't know way, can you give me answer? and if you want i will provide you URl of that blog.

Ever since Rand's statement that Google looks at user-experience factors as well now, I have been wondering if too many ads could damage the ranking results. Knowing it does does not help much in my position. Most sites I am responsible for are basically paid for via ads.

I guess I have to find out, how much ad-space I can sacrifice so that rankings lead to more visits and ,ore clicks on the remaining ads.

I totally agree with the concept of websites that have a natural linking profile ranking higher as compared to websites that thrive on paid links. However i also believe that usability of a website should also be a ranking factor. At the end of the day it’s all about providing the best results to the users. What’s the point if a user is taken to a website that ranks higher because of its domain age or natural linking profile but is absolutely useless as far as usability is concerned. My prediction is that Google in the near future will definitely look into the bounce rates of websites and tweak its own algorithm to incorporate the usability factor as well. I hope that after two years when SEOMOZ conducts another research it finds usability as one of the correlation factors. More importantly this will result in SEMs focusing more on the user rather than the search engines.

Great info...enjoyed....I saw poor site response effect's on over all ranking another good point would be site's bounce rate factor after panda up gradation(though I am confused with this metrics and didn't find any remarkable results on that factor)...

I have to double check the follow-no follows issue. I made a few changes on a domain regarding follow-nofollow and adsense a couple of weeks ago and that domain got higher in rankings. So I'll have to test on othes sites now the follow-nofollws issue. I'll get back to you on that one.

Good article! I especially like your "disclaimer" that "correlation does not equal causation".

I feel that is really the case for long / hyphen-domains:

- If it were possible to measure how many of the "hyphen"-domains are BFA and keep the BFA-pages out of the equation, I am sure they would not rank worse. Older, bigger, non BFA-Domains also tend to have less AdSense because they also use different methods of monetization.

- It would be interesting to see how "short phantasy" domain names rank compared to hyphen-URLs. All things being equal, I would strongly believe that "free-internet-radio.com" would rank better than "pandora.com".

- I personally like hyphen-domains! It´s much easier to read and see what the domain is about, especially in languages like German where words tend to be really long anyway...

Obviously, this is not theoretical economics, so there will never ever be a "certeris paribus" validation on SEO.... and as such, knowledge about (theoretical) negative ranking factors is still important!

No-follows are still useful in today's SEO, they provide a keyword targeted anchor text, which can help associate your website with more strength toward specific keyword rankings. They do not pass along a lot of link-juice, but are still needed in your portfolio of in-bound linking.

Domain Name extension - Google has announced specific .in and other heavily "spammed" domains are put through a more rigorous analysis concerning their quality and to ensure the usefulness of content. This will put your site back a few months if your trying to work through the algorithms.

The correlation between percentage of followed links and rankings certainly makes sense. There's been a lot of talk about Google using social signals, i.e. Twitter links, as a ranking factor - and these are nofollow.

For me this gives more weight to social signals research we've been seeing. Google seems to want to promote brands that get talked about on social networks, and that means ranking sites with a large volume of nofollow links.

I won't be rushing out to build nofollow links for my clients, but I will be encouraging them to use social media more effectively.

I like the finding that longer URLs correlate with lower rankings. And, indeed, they do look much spammier.

I'm of the opinion that a strong brand is more valuable than an exact match URL. Not only does it spark new search interest once the site/business has gained traction, I'd be willing to bet people are more willing to spend their money on a branded site than "cheap-yellow-and-black-puma-soccer-shoes.com"

This WBF is helpful for those like me who need to give tons of details to clients who need more and more explanations...correlations don't always means causations but sometimes when you see a lot of obvious traditionnal SEO signals on a a link profile of a website which ranks well, then you may be tempted to do the same!

As I am closely analyzing different websites after the Pandas 1st attack so I do have an idea of Ad sense or at least too much ads on the page can hurt, response time and others factors what new for me was Domain Name length.

From the all the negative rankings mentioned in the post, I think this is pretty much clear that Google is thinking a lot like a normal user when coming to the website should react… all the negative ranking factors are those which are not really liked by human brain…

Yes you are right, Now google is analysing tons of factors before ranking a website. Now not only unique content is responsible for your ranking, lots of other factors are evaluated before you rank as Cyrus has mentioned above. Thanks Cyrus for another great WBF.......

Interesting Post and I am too agree with the last post that we should try making some social links and promoting websites on social websites. A good number of social backlinks with maintain ratio of followed links can help rank better on Google.

I have a couple of sites that I believe are the exeption to the corelation about adsense. I think it just goes to show that many spammy site use Adsense to try to make a quick buck rather than producing good quality content and placing advertising on those sites. Thanks guys.

I've had to convince plenty of clients that Google is not going to help or hurt their site based on their AdSense usage. I think there are a lot of SEO newbies that are looking for the magic button to SEO success. It just doesn't work that way!

Just wanted to say that I really like the new design of the Whiteboard Friday post! Sometimes you don't realize how unoptimal something is until you don't have to cope with it anymore! And wow, look at all those subheads and categorizations and links.. you guys have really raised the bar on this one!

I realized my original comment might sound a little too sarcastic... but yes the transcript is easier to read! Even if you just take out the italics tags, you know? I thought maybe there was an idea to better organize the WBF transcript because having those subheads and so forth is probably better for SEO...

It's a relief to hear that diversity of links seems correlated with better rankings! I've always felt that to be the case, and in fact, that's how we organize our SEO service and I explain our linkbuilding activities to our customers in just that way. Glad to hear confirmation of this strategy!

I think its more a matter of trust. I wouldn't say no follow links necessarily provide link juice - they can just indicate to Google that your site is a useful resource (especially if the no follow link comes from Wikipedia or a similarly strong site)

Google has stated in the past that they don't follow nofollow links, but that was way back in 2007. Recently they've been more cagey on the subject. I think the takeaway is not specifically about nofollow links, but that sites with broad, diverse link profiles tend to perform better in search.

I'd take a quality site nofollow any day over a low quality site follow. And, outgoing I use nofollows strategically in linking to authority sites while not watering down the link juice that has a clear follow destination.

The fallacy of the situation, I believe, is grouping all no-follows in the same category. We don't group all follows in the same category. For follows we categorize them based upon the domain and page quality, the placement on the page, whether they are contextual links or not, whether they are in comments or not, etc. All of these same factors must be considered by Google for no-follows.

Clearly a no-follow link from a username in the blog comments of some unread and over spammed blog is of very different value than a no-follow in a well-trafficked article or to a lesser extent in Wikipedia. Google isn't blind, and certainly isn't going to overshare so that we can overgame the system.

"Clearly a no-follow link from a username in the blog comments of some unread and over spammed blog is of very different value than a no-follow in a well-trafficked article or to a lesser extent in Wikipedia. Google isn't blind, and certainly isn't going to overshare so that we can overgame the system."

What's the point of nofollow'ing any links in a scenario like this? It was meant to prevent links on one page from influencing the ranking of the target page, but if nofollow'ed links "clearly" have value for the target based on the authority of the source, then Google must have given up on nofollow and returned to the way things were before they introduced it.

Personally i do belive google does add some weight to no follows and or citations. Upon a recently review of a major bed retailor in the UK vs its competitors the main difference between the number 1 and 2 spot was that the competitor had 50+ citations/no follow links.

This post might work for some people but I have couple of brands on SEOmoz and this video seems to be an opposit of what I am looking in my memeber area. I compared our brands and brand which has more followed links is not performing well now.

There is nothing special concept involved in this post. Why because, when we are taking care of the positive sides of SEO, automatically these negative things will vanish.... What you mentioned in this post is regular and basic things while we are doing SEO.In my point of view, there are so many other negative ranking factors are also available...Percentage of Do-follow links are very lessHing Page loading timeOveruse of Targeted Keywords External Links to Low Quality sites or Spam SitesExcessive JavascriptFrequency of Content Change (regular changes)I hope this will help users knowing more negative factors.I will update some more in a short while........Plz share your valuable thoughts on this....